Thea Quiachon's Glimpse into the Dreamer's Reality
Figures and layers of paint give these otherwise blank canvases a picture, but only barely. The figures we do see are something yet nothing: unidentifiable people, vague landscapes and origami figures seemingly made out of wet tissue. The pictures tell a story, but it is neither here nor there.
In this exhibit, Quiachon tries to picture what it is that dreamers see in the mundane, but only the dream parts uninterrupted by either noise of dream and reality. Each painting is someone's day to day as viewed through the lenses of a tomorrow hoped for. Nebulous the figures are they take on a concrete identity as a whole, a picturesque view of somewhere that isn't in front of their eyes.
The exhibit is an anthology of people who tread two paths and every painting is a photograph of both.
A TOUCHING EXHIBIT YOU SHOULDN'T TOUCH
Ciane Xavier, Ganavee Lazaro, Jezzel Wee, Marco Rosario and Mikee Naval's Softly, Firmly
Ceramic is weird stuff, it starts out soft and pliable but after you fire it up it becomes stiff and brittle that attempting to do what you did a while ago will net you either nothing or a pile of shards.
This group exhibition shows ceramic as a medium of paradox, how a malleable thing can become hard set and how though hard set it still keeps its softness in its curves.
Xavier's heads are akin to portraits of a mind in the midst of an emotion, each face molded to the mind it contains.
Lazaro recreates the use of clay in devotion by making small objects that would look like they are used in some sort of ritual, may it be a tool or an object of worship. The softness in form evokes the rather primitive means primitive men made their idols.
Wee's trees take on a dynamic form against the static ceramic, mimicking the branches sawing in the wind. The sculptures are also incense cone holders so if used this way the smoke will create a finicky canopy that is jus subject to the winds.
Rosario's shapely fruits are dressed up (also in ceramic), the flower vases shaped nothing like the usual ones, as these ones are round, bulbous and seemingly unstable, the fruits (pun intended) of the artist's struggle to soften the ceramic through form.
Naval's objects are the most practical of the bunch, as they should; they represent practicality itself. The "Panali" series places eponymous tying material through each object as marks of resourcefulness.
Each piece is about ceramic itself, its versatility, its properties and its ubiquity, as these works tend to share the same appearance as kitsch.
FAITH-ALL-YOU-CAN
Farley del Rosario's Divine Code Switch
Syncretism on asteroids as religious imagery is mixed into a blend that just won't coagulate. If all creeds are equally valid and all beliefs are true what comes out is something close to this exhibit.
Every caricature is an image of a messed-up quest for meaning and enlightenment, an icon to the conclusions to every sojourn fueled by vibes and whatever else is needed to have something one can call faith. Divine depictions are a who's who of surface conceptions of deities and human portraits feature men not as visionaries but as spiritual interest stories.
Del Rosario's exhibit shows the ultimate consequence of the ideal secular world where as nothing is sacred everything becomes sacred: you get a divine free-for-all.